A recent blog
by Ed Bott over at ZDNET has brought
even more attention to Microsoft's Windows Genuine Authentication (WGA) which
has been coming under increasing scrutiny
and has even been the subject of a lawsuit.
Computerworld and Ed Bott have been
trying to get to the bottom of the whole WGA mystery and some of the issues
being brought to the forefront are quite interesting.

Microsoft’s WGA utility, which is used on the Windows XP
operating system to combat piracy, has been used in the past to validate OS
installs so that users could download certain system updates as well as
downloads like Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta and Windows Media Player 11. But
while Microsoft sees WGA as a major ally in the fight against pirates, the
utility has been pegging some innocent customers as having pirated copies of
Windows XP. "80% of all WGA validation failures are due to unauthorized
use of leaked or stolen volume license keys," said
a Microsoft spokeswoman to Computerworld.

Ed Bott, not satisfied with this response from Microsoft,
fired off his own inquiry into the reason for a 20% false positive rating for
WGA and received this response from Cori Hartje, Director of Microsoft’s
Genuine Software Initiative, "While we will don't have specifics to share
on other forms counterfeit installations, they mostly result from activities
such as various forms of tampering and unauthorized OEM installations."

There are rumors that indicate that the WGA's accuracy is dangerously off. People complaining about WGA declaring their copy not genuine when they believe it is. The question is, was Microsoft too heavy handed in the WGA code so that even legit copies are turning up to not be, or are people running illegal copies unknowingly, or are the pirates trying to create a media frenzy to destroy their competition so they can keep selling and using illegal copies.

I personally would have expected the first generation of WGA to be a simple key check. Even that could have problems, like if someone guesses your legit key and uses it to install their OS.

That's either funny or you badly need some education. WGA wouldn't likely exist at all in a free market and certainly not be prone to accusations of piracy for purchased licenses. Remember, YOU can't argue away that 20% with random BS, it is already conceded to be erroneous by the source that wants to paint it in the best light possible.

Where do you get such nonsense? I use a couple high-end software packages (costing $100K+/copy) in a market in which no company has anywhere near a 50% market share. Each of them is considerably more intrusive with their license validation than is WGA. One of them requires you to obtain a per-day usage key EVERY TIME you run the application.

> "YOU can't argue away that 20% with random BS, it is already conceded to be erroneous by the source...."

Oops, nothing of the sort. Reread the source article; you apparently misinterpreted it seriously.

Quite possibly so, but on this issue more educated than are you. According to the OED-- the definitive standard of the English language-- the phrase "could care less" is a colloqualism for "couldn't care less", and one that, in contempory English, is used considerably more often than the original.